Doris Lessing is another one of those authors who I have been meaning to read a lot more by but haven’t quite got around to it. However, a couple of weeks ago I was recommended The Fifth Child by Academic Friend, who generally has impeccable taste. One second-hand copy later, I can confirm that Academic Friend’s reputation for impeccable taste remains very much intact.

Harriet and David Lovatt are living, breathing examples of domestic bliss. They have four happy and healthy children, a wonderful marriage, and a big house that fills with extended family and friends during the holidays. They are strapped for cash, but financially helped by David’s very rich father, and other than some family members being uneasy about the couple’s rapidly expanding brood of children, things really are good for the Lovatts. Then Harriet falls pregnant with Ben, their fifth child.

The pregnancy is extraordinarily difficult, but that’s nothing compared to how difficult their lives become when Ben is born. He is “a sickly and implacable shadow…

…Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable, the infant Ben, ‘full of cold dislike’, tears at Harriet’s breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world.”

On one level, this novel works as a straight-forward gothic horror story, reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby. While there is no suggestion of satanic intervention, to say Ben is violent is somewhat of an understatement: he kills two pets in cold blood while still a toddler. Ben, then, is the unknown – he seems to be unnatural in his strength, both physically and mentally. In that sense, it is a truly frightening book that shows that anyone might give birth to an almost literal monster. Ben’s apparently untamable behaviour eventually drives a stake through the heart of the family, immediate and extended. Like other horror novels, the idea of the uncontrollable or the unknown is what creates much of the terror.

On a higher level, though, I was struck throughout the book by the fact that everyone from David to other family members, even her doctor, somehow blamed Harriet for Ben’s nature. The doctor, finding nothing physically wrong with the child, concludes that Harriet is the unwell, possibly even delusional, one. After one particularly harrowing incident, most of the extended family cut themselves off from Harriet because they see her actions as selfish when she tries to look after her youngest child. If Ben is ‘other’, then Harriet is to be condemned for bringing ‘otherness’ into the world.

I was talking to Academic Friend about this via email last week, and she made another excellent point that somewhat contradicts my feminist-inspired reading of the novel as an indictment of a patriarchal culture that indulges in easy mother-blaming. Rather, she suggested, the novel is perhaps making a mockery of maternity itself, through the repeated worries voiced by other characters that Harriet and David were having too many children (and too quickly) and the fact that Harriet devoted herself to Ben’s care rather than, in AF’s words, “foster the warm, beautiful, happy things in her life”. By trying to be a good mother to Ben, she made herself a bad mother to her other four children. AF also read the novel as a possible indictment of the “every child must succeed” mantra, which I think is another valuable way to look at it.

My only real reservation about the novel is its rather uncomfortable usage of the word “mongol” to describe a child with Down’s Syndrome. At first I tried to put it down to the fact the book was written over 20 years ago when such a term was perhaps more common (though still a horrible term). However, the novel makes reference to the fact that using that word was no longer the done thing, yet still uses it repeatedly. I found it uncomfortable.

That aside, is The Fifth Child critiquing a society that blames the mother all too easily, or is the novel critiquing maternity itself? I’m not sure, both would seem to be viable readings. Either way, the maternal instinct seems to me to be the most powerful thing in this novel that charts a very unnerving power struggle.